Kelly McParland: Liberals need less Trudeau, more Mackenzie King

Liberals need less Trudeau, more Mackenzie King

I was shopping before Christmas and came across a new book on Pierre Trudeau: Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman 1944-1965 by Max and Monique Nemni. This is the second volume on Trudeau by the Nemnis, presumably with more to come, since Volume Two only takes us to the cusp of his parliamentary career.

Nearby the Nemnis book was another book on Trudeau, and near that, a book on Margaret Trudeau. The Nemni biography is the second recent assessment of Trudeau’s life: a well-received two-volume official account was produced by the historian and academic John English, beginning in 2006. English wrote an earlier volume on Trudeau, The Hidden Pierre Trudeau, published in 2004. In addition there have been books by Nino Ricci, Ron Graham and Ramsay Cook, just in the past five years. There is a whole library of works from earlier years, not to mention those by Trudeau himself.

There is another new book on a Canadian prime minister in the stores this season, Allan Levine’s King: William Lyon Mackenzie King, a Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny. It’s the first full biography of the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister in 30 years. King doesn’t get a lot of attention from Canadian historians. The other main work of the past decade was “Friends and Lovers“, a look at his odd (to say the least) relationship with (preferably married) women.

Which made me wonder: Why are we so obsessed with Pierre Trudeau, and so little interested in King, who re-assembled the Liberal party from scratch beginning in 1919 and, when he finally stepped down in 1948, handed over the most potent and successful political machine the country has ever seen? Don’t tell me it’s because Trudeau was charismatic and King was dull and gray. Mackenzie King was by far the weirdest man ever to run this country, and he ran it for 22 years. What’s more, his utter nuttiness is there for all to see, in 30,000 pages of the diary he kept for 50 years, and which is available free online .

Most Canadians first became aware of King’s secret world in 1976, in C.P. Stacey’s A Very Double Life. Stacey told us about the nightly sessions in the little room on the third floor of Laurier House, where King chatted with his long dead mother, sister and brother, plus a host of friends, relatives and historic figures who regularly trooped through, offering advice and support. He was big on seances and table rapping; messages hidden in clouds, tea leaves and shaving cream; secret signals sent via dreams, visions and daytime revelations. He may or may no have tramped the street looking for prostitutes to rescue, and venerated images of his mother the way pilgrims react to images of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Yet Stacey barely scraped the surface. And even in his enjoyable biography, Levine can only add so much more. He notes that the King papers in Ottawa fill an area equal to three football fields. Much of the diary has only become easily available recently. Yet we’re satisfied with a new look at King every 30 years or so while constantly inspecting and re-inspecting the minutia of Trudeau’s life in search of some new revelation to chew over.

It’s not that Trudeau was the better politician, or the more important figure. King conceived and created the self-sustaining electoral juggernaut that current party elders would kill to have back. King brought Quebec into the Liberal fold and kept it there, ensuring majority after majority from 1935 through to 1957. He began the transition from British supplicant to independent Canadian nation that Pearson and Trudeau completed. He did it while balancing the books, keeping the country united and alienating very few. With the exception of Alberta, which was in thrall to Social Credit, the Liberal party was viable throughout the West into the 1950s.

King also established the image of the Liberals as the party of social welfare, though he was horrified of debt and believed strongly in individual responsibility. It was Trudeau who twisted that out of shape, setting off a borrowing binge that amassed debt and shackled a generation to the eternal repayment plan. Trudeau amplified the breach with the West that no Liberal since has put much effort into healing and which has largely eliminated it from the country’s most vibrant region. But perhaps worst of all, it was Trudeau who personified and validated the superiority complex the party is still struggling to rid itself of, the belief in its absolute right to rule, the sense that Liberalism is the only authentic manifestation of the Canadian character. Every Liberal leader since has been infected to some degree by the assumption of the inevitability of Liberal success, and its manifest right to expect it. Peter C. Newman, in his new book on Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals’ decline, writes: “If politics is a fever of the blood, arrogance is the Liberals genetic code.”

As they scratch through the ashes of what they once had, looking for a few flecks of hope, Liberals might be better to quit fantasizing about a new Trudeau and skip farther back into their own past. Mackenzie King, for all his weirdness, understood the Canadian character and played to it, oriented his party to satisfy it, and won long-term allegiance to its values rather than to himself. When Trudeau left he took whatever personal magic he had with him, and it turned out there wasn’t a lot else left behind. Charisma is not a workable political platform, and during his 15 years the party became Trudeau, and expected the country to do so as well, or take a hike.

When King retired he left the country in sound financial shape, vibrant, peaceful and sure of itself. If not perfectly at harmony, it was at least in a period of truce over French-English relations. His party was strong and united, and easily won two more majorities after he departed. Trudeau left the country deep in debt and saddled with an enormous deficit. The West was angry and alienated, Quebec in the throes of its separatist fervour. The party was crushed at the next election and would spend nine years out of power, and still struggles with other Trudeau-era legacies it has yet to overcome.

We don’t need more Trudeau. As Liberals debate how to revive their party, they would do well to ignore their most charismatic leader and head straight to the dull gray man who gave them the position of strength they have since squandered.